THREE-STRIKES CHANGE BRINGS RELEASE

Inmate is first to be resentenced after voters revised law to focus on violent felonies

San Diego 
In a hearing that took less than eight minutes, San Diego Superior Court Judge David Danielsen cleared the way Wednesday for Kenneth Corley, 62, to get out of prison after spending 16 years there under California’s three-strikes law.

Danielsen formally resentenced Corley to 15 years and four months in prison. Because he has been incarcerated longer than that, he will be released in the next few days.

Corley becomes the first to be resentenced — and given another chance at freedom — under a revision to the three-strikes law that California voters overwhelmingly approved on Nov. 6.

He has been serving a sentence of 25 years to life in prison since 1996. Corley was sentenced under the original 1994 three-strikes law that called for life sentences for anyone convicted of a third felony.

Under this year’s Proposition 36, the law was changed to require a third strike be a violent or serious felony. It also allowed current inmates whose last strike was a nonserious or nonviolent offense to ask for a resentencing.

Corley’s case had been in the works for months under a program District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis started about a year ago with the Office of the Public Defender and the Institute for Criminal Defense Advocacy at California Western School of Law in San Diego.

The goal was to identify inmates serving life sentences for nonviolent offenses under the three-strikes law and determine if they were candidates to be released. Corley’s case was one of the first identified.

Corley was a lifelong drug addict with a record of nonviolent offenses that were mostly burglaries, which he did to feed his habit. Lawyers from the California Western program took on his case as part of Dumanis’ effort. They argued that since going to prison in 1996 Corley earned a GED certificate and had no discipline problems.

The lawyers said he was not a risk to public safety if released. Along with the District Attorney’s Office, they drew up a re-entry plan for Corley that includes a place to live in San Diego and a job. In a statement, Dumanis said that was a key factor in supporting his release from prison.

“Such re-entry services are a critical component of stopping the revolving door to prison, such as the one Mr. Corley went through time and time again,” she said.

Justin Brooks, a California Western law professor who worked on the case, said after Wednesday’s hearing that Corley was an example of the kind of inmates Proposition 36 was meant to help, and he was confident Corley would not end up in prison again.

“It makes no sense to put people in prison for the rest of their lives for nonviolent offenses,” Brooks said.

Proposition 36 was approved by 68.8 percent of California’s voters, and 67 percent of San Diego County’s voters.